


make little piles of all the things you don’t understand

by freudiancascade



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Character Death, Corpse Desecration, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Gore, and all other kinds of canon-typical nastiness, cw for canon-typical illness, gerard keay character study, i just love that funky lil goth, incarceration, y'know -- that whole "gerard keay" deal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 08:58:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18070385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freudiancascade/pseuds/freudiancascade
Summary: Will I be this way when I’m dead?Will I go home and go to bed?Will I wake up and wonder,Did something happen here?Where do monsters come from? Gerard Keay knows, and he can tell anybody who asks.





	make little piles of all the things you don’t understand

* * *

Where do monsters come from?

Gerard Keay is five, the first time he sees one. He tugs at his mother’s sleeve, and she brushes him off with annoyance. She is here on business, and he was so excited to finally be big enough to join her on a trip.

“It’s rude to stare, Gerard,” she says, clipped and precise.

He stares anyways, all wide eyes and towheaded innocence. He has just lost his first front tooth, and his tongue traces the gap where it used to live.

The monster stares at him in return, and opens a mouth that is all teeth. Each of them is sharp enough to make something that Gerard does not yet understand fall inside his stomach. A squeak escapes his throat, and he hides behind his mother’s leg.

She is disappointed in him, and does not offer comfort.

Next time, he decides, he’s going to do a better job of being brave.

* * *

Where do monsters come from?

When Gerard is a bit older, he gets lost inside the Lukas mansion. His mother is busy haggling over the price of a Leitner with a man in a polished suit, and he gets bored enough to wander off.

Gerard has just started wearing only black, and he thinks he’s going to try darkening his hair as soon as he finds the money for dye. He is fascinated by the goths in music videos and magazines, people who carry themselves like they’re beyond being hurt by the world and dress like they’re ready to fight a war. He wants to be that when he grows up; he wants to be untouchable. He knows full well that the world has infinite ways of inflicting pain and despair, and he likes the loud music that understands this fact without trying to make it pretty or palatable. Recently, he’s tried to pierce his own ears with a stolen needle. The left one healed well but the right has infected horribly, and it throbs in time with his heartbeat as he moves aimlessly through the mansion’s opulent corridors and empty rooms.

He could spend the rest of his life in here and never see another living soul. At first this doesn’t seem like a horrible fate--he is still young enough that the Lonely doesn’t strike him as an especially noteworthy Horror. Gerard can recite Smirke’s entire list backwards and forwards, and tease out the blurry edges where the awful parts of the world overlap. He knows ritual and spellcraft, and he can trace his family lineage back several centuries. It would not be awful to spend the rest of his life alone and away from those lessons, he thinks, even as the sun shifts across the sky and the mansion starts to grow dark. The shadows here are longer than they should be, and the back of his neck prickles as though he is being watched in his wanderings.

Only then does he start to think that maybe the Lonely is worth respect, after all.

The man that finally rescues him is broad-shouldered and smells of sea salt. He laughs with a booming intensity, and his hand feels too heavy on Gerard’s shoulder.

“Let’s get you back to your mother, baby bat. I don’t think you belong with us.”

“What if I’d like to?” Gerry challenges, lifting his chin and trying to look old enough to be taken seriously.

The man just laughs again, patronizing and self-assured as he steers them both towards the correct door. “You wouldn’t.”

* * *

 Where do monsters come from?

He runs away from home for the first time when he is thirteen. It is ill-considered and doesn’t last very long, and his mother doesn’t even have the tact to handle it in any way one might consider “normal.” Instead she calls him back home with a binding spell, the spikes of her ritual hooking through his spine like tugging on the leash of a disobedient puppy, and Gerard drags himself reluctantly back through the open bedroom window before they can tear anything too important out of place.

She hadn’t even bothered to close it when she’d found him gone.

Next time he’ll be more careful and take appropriate countermeasures, and she’ll have to get more creative. Eventually she’ll stop calling him home at all, and they both accept that he’ll slink back eventually no matter how determined he is not to. They can’t leave each other alone with this, and it’s hard to say which one of them them hates it more, some days.

_(Blood is a thicker binding than any Horror could ever be--the Lukas family had that much right, at least.)_

He brings his mother books like a cat offering dead things to the neighbor that feeds it, dropping peace offerings bound in leather and time at her feet. Mary coos delighted and Gerard tries to not feel warmed by the glow of her praise. When her attention is on him, he feels invincible, and he hates basking in this feeling nearly as much as he yearns for it. He learns to cook, preparing meals for her to pick at when she gets too absorbed in her work to eat. He learns to handle the shop, keeping balanced ledgers and inventories. He learns to travel well, navigating airports all around the world as easily as tracing symbols on the back of his hand. He learns more and more about the Horrors, until he's nearly bored to tears with them all. He's _smart_ , much too smart for anybody's own good, and he knows if he looks like he wants to look then nobody will ever see that coming.

He's had enough of the knives held to his throat now, enough of the guns to his head, enough of the claws to his feeble wrists, enough of the teeth bared at him in the dark. He knows that he can and should take every advantage he can get.

He listens to his music too loud and colors his hair too inky black to suit his complexion, then, and begins accumulating tattoos. Anger burns hot and deep inside him, and some days he feels like he could boil over with it and set the entire world alight. Gerry still runs away, sometimes, when it’s all too much and the walls press too close.

Often, though, he’s back before the sun even finishes in its rising.

Years pass and Gerard Keay grows up, and sometimes--only sometimes--Mary Keay looks his way long enough to notice facets of the person he’s become. She never gets the whole picture, though.

Gerry does not give his mother that, and it never occurs to her to ask for it.

* * *

Where do monsters come from?

It’s rather rude of the police to not let him clean the blood off before they throw him in a nondescript interview room and walk away. He knows it’s intentional, letting him stew covered in his own mother’s viscera before they prod him for answers, poke him with prying questions, shine that movie-bright light bulb in his face and hope he breaks down into confession, but he honestly doesn’t _care_.

Gerry is exhausted. He’s numb. His skin is itchy and stiff where the gore has dried onto it, and he hasn’t cried yet. He can’t even bring himself to be properly _angry_ , either. That emotion has fled from him for the time being, and the space inside his chest where it lived has become a bottomless pit.

None of it’s sunk in, really. He’s seen so many civilians go into shock when confronted abruptly with the supernatural, but recognizing the symptoms of it in himself takes a degree of mental gymnastics that astounds him. He feels like there is static pulsing through his limbs, and time goes all bizarre and floaty around the edges. It’s like staring down the barrel of a nightmare tinged in red, and he can’t bring himself to flinch away from it.

No part of the interrogation makes much of an impression on him, and he moves through it on autopilot. Gerard doesn’t say much of anything to anybody, and eventually the police must get tired of looking at him like that and allow him to take a shower.

The water runs red down the drain, and if there are finally tears mixed in with the flood, well. Nobody else needs to know about it.

* * *

Where do monsters come from?

Gerard is sitting on the cool tile floor of the bathroom, his hair up in a dye-slick knot atop his head and a bottle of bourbon in his fist. He doesn’t _like_ drinking the stuff, but it makes her mad, so he does it all the same. Raises a tattooed middle finger, flipping Mary Keay’s omnipresent ghost off with the sigil of the Eye, and swallows down a gulp that burns.

By all the Horrors, he has bad taste in booze.

He doesn’t lean his head against the wall--it’s not worth leaving a dark patch of black dye stuck to the faded green paint. But he does sigh and tip it backwards, just a little, to stare up at the ceiling fan. There’s no point in trying to keep on music, not with _her_ around to float interference through the stereo and send it screeching into feedback hell. He’s got an egg timer sitting on the counter, and nowhere to go until it’s time to rinse himself clean. Had the foresight to bring a book--nothing arcane or morbid this time, just a paperback thriller--but he can’t focus on it. It sits on the floor beside him, spine up, pages splayed to the ground.

The ghost of Mary Keay is still positioned halfway through the door and talking incessantly, something about how he looked so much nicer before he started tattooing and painting and dyeing himself. And then she veers into how it’s a futile effort anyways, the Eye doesn’t even _want_ him. Not with all the books he’s burned.

_(Do you see it yet? The pattern? Wanting, being wanted? Odd, how none of it seems to connect the way he’d ever hoped it would. None of them want him--but he knows that, already.)_

It’s not worth even pretending to argue back.

* * *

Where do monsters come from?

_(He hates when this world forces violence out of him, but he thinks he’d hate the alternative even more. He is not in the business of rescuing strays, but he is even less in the business of standing idly by and letting them die._

_There is nothing to discuss here._

_Next question.)_

* * *

Where do monsters come from?

The Archivist has no reason to help him, no reason to reach out and offer her aid. It is not how any of this world works, he knows. She will want recompense for her time and expertise, same as any other tradesperson plying their craft to the desperate and needy. He’s heard enough of the Institute to know it’s a rubbish fire of politics and blood. People die if they get too close, and Gertrude Robinson is usually at the heart of their endings.

It doesn’t take him as long as it should to decide he doesn’t give a single solitary shit.

Gerry hands over the book, and walks away to let the old woman do what she will with it.

The first night he falls asleep entirely on his own in the world, he almost can’t. The flat above the bookshop is so silent, and the oil paintings he’s hung on his bedroom walls stare down at him. They are unfeeling and unblinking, and Gerard supposes this means that maybe the Eye isn’t finished with him yet after all.

He awakens exhausted from a night of fitful nightmares, rising early and going to the Archives. Getrude is already there waiting, calm and composed. There is a burn mark in the book she hands back to him to inspect, and she has a job for him to do. It is not employment--she makes that very clear, and he is grateful enough for that. Just a favor, asked in a way he truly can’t refuse.

All in all, much better than he expected. He figures maybe he can handle this, and heads to the airport without saying goodbye to anybody.

_(Who would even miss Gerard Keay now, anyways?)_

* * *

Where do monsters come from?

Gerry likes losing himself in the world. There are cities that are too clean, too orderly, too nice for him to feel truly safe in. Monaco, for example, freaks him right out. It’s too structured, with the state-sponsored no-littering signs every twenty metres and carefully manicured beds of flowers that know better than to dance too wildly in the spring breeze. He pokes his head into the aquarium anyways, just to say he did it, but does not linger any longer there than he must. He can’t figure out if it’s Vast or Buried nonsense, the long tunnel with endless water and colorful fish pressing down on all sides, but either way it sets him on edge.

He feels much more at home in the parts of Europe where the history runs as thick as honey through the streets, and the people know better than to try and sweep it away. Prague is nice, if one can get past the Corruption infestation in a corner of the sewer system. After clearing that out, he stands in the shower in a faded hotel room until the hot water runs out, letting the water attempt fruitlessly to wash him clean.

The next morning he stands in front of an astronomical clock face that has lasted nearly as long as his bloodline and watches it for the better part of an hour, neck craned upwards at the old brick tower. The circles and shapes move slowly, and the crowd ebbs and flows around him. It always did fascinate him a little bit, how people organize their lives and beliefs in absence of the tangible proof that the world is a horrible place. Two figures stand on either side of the clock--chronicler, angel, astronomer, philosopher--and Gerry studies their chipped paint faces with an intensity that surprises him a little. The gilded gold of the angel’s wings catches the fading sunlight, and then goes dim as the sun passes behind a cloud.

Then, and only then, does he leave. It doesn’t matter how the heavens move, not really. Not to him, anyways.

He calls Gertrude that night and tells her that this latest job is done; she sends to his laptop the coordinates of another statement she’d like investigated, a transcript in spidery handwriting, and a plane ticket. Amsterdam, this time. If she knows he delayed in contacting her, she does not comment on it.

_(Well, she probably does know. Maybe she decided he needed a chance to catch his breath. Maybe she was just distracted by a really good book. Who can even tell, with that kind of person, what logic beats in their brains?)_

Gerard always travels light. He figures his heart is heavy enough to carry, and he’s old enough now that there’s no point in making the strain on his back any worse. He checks out from his hotel that evening, and does not look backwards.

Sometimes when he closes his eyes, though, the glint of that gold still shines like sunspots behind them. He thinks about that, perhaps, more than he probably should.

* * *

Where do monsters come from?

When he dies, it is grotesque and mundane and tragic. One moment he is walking back to the hotel after dinner in Pittsburgh, throwing theories about the Circus back and forth with the Archivist; the next, there is haywire electricity dancing across his swollen brain to leave him spasming and clenching on the sidewalk. He comes back to himself staring up at the streetlamps, unable to make out the curves of them against the lights that swirl behind his corneas. He is confused and disoriented; Gertrude does not let him get back up. She’s already called an ambulance.

Gertrude sits with him in the back of the vehicle as the paramedics work. Gerry doesn’t remember much of the ride, only flashbulb images of strangers trying to locate his veins beneath the tattoos and force anticonvulsants into his shuddering body. The Archivist is there to watch it happen--she is always watching him--and her eyes are sharp and keen and not entirely unkind.

There is something much bigger Seeing him through her, and Gerard wants to yell at it every bit as much as he knows it would be pointless.

In the hospital, he fades quickly. His vision blurs; he can not lift his head or swallow; ice chips melt on his heavy tongue. Part of him is grateful that it ends this way--quietly, pointlessly, no greater statement or legacy left behind. The only battle left to him is to refuse the pain medication, and he could cry at how simple it all is.

_(He does cry once, with mingled relief and terror, in the dark hours of the morning when he is entirely alone. By the time Getrude comes back, he is stoic once more. His body may be falling, but he admires her too much to want her to see his heart turn weak._

_This much, Gerard Keay gets to keep for himself.)_

The last leaf falls off his family tree, and there’s nothing more to say about it than that.

* * *

Where do monsters come from?

As it turns out, Gerard does not get to keep the fear and pain of his dying for himself. He should be mad about that, but instead he only feels empty.

The hunters look at his ghost like they’ve captured a bird inside a snare, and Gerard has to resist the urge to roll his eyes at how _petty_ it all is. He is not here; he can not be hurt. It is almost a point of pride to rattle off the particulars of how blind and insignificant they are, pebbles against the tide of a war beyond anything they could have imagined.

There is a pendant around the woman’s wrist, tied to a leather cord wrapped so tight it can barely be seen. Gerard catches the wink of silver, the half-moon crescent and four lines that cut out from beneath it like sharpened knives, and _knows_.

They could talk, him and this woman, about legacy and blood. If she wanted. If he chose.

She does not want, and so he does not choose. She just shifts backwards, adjusting her weight to compensate for a leg injured while escaping a police lock-up. Her eyes are alight with a feral hunger and wild greed, and so she is not pretty. The man behind her is even less so, face obscured beneath a wiry beard and that same manic bloodlust alight in his gaze. They have both of them been worn hard and mean, and Gerry knows suddenly that he’s made a horrible mistake.

They will not burn his page.

Not now that the world is so much bigger, and there are so many more things in it to Hunt.

* * *

Where do monsters go?

_(Oh, don’t play coy--you know this part already.)_

Gerry is dead-eyed in a prison cell. He is alone and lost in a labyrinthine mansion. He is standing in a vast Archive, soothed by the scents of paper and time. He is in yet another tattoo parlor, making small talk with an artist who has no way of understanding why he wants what he wants. He is sleeping against the window of an airplane, miles above the Atlantic ocean. He is in a hospital bed, and he is ending. He is snapshot and flashbulb, sunspot and spark, a bright point in the dark and the afterimage it leaves behind. He is a page in an unnamed book, a side character in the saving of the world. He is a ghost, and he is tired.

He has always been tired.

He is covered in blood. He is covered in grave dirt. He is covered in machinery. He is covered in a burial shroud. He is covered in ink.

He is on fire, he is on fire, he is on fire.

Gerard Keay knows where monsters come from, and he'll tell anybody who asks.

It doesn't make a difference, anyways.


End file.
